Last week we saw a brief behind-the-scenes featurette from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation focusing on Tom Cruise’s death-defying plane stunt, and now Simon Pegg has taken time out to discuss his co-star’s hi-octane antics.

“Yep, that’s a typical day on set for Mission: Impossible,” says Pegg, “Tom hanging onto the side of a plane! It’s very important to Tom that people have that experience of knowing that it’s not a stuntman. It adds a degree of tension when you know that it’s the actor doing it, because it stays in your mind that it’s still the character onscreen. It’s important for the film that there’s a layer of extra tension whereby the audience is going, ‘Oh my god, he’s doing that. He’s on the side of that plane, he’s driving that car.’”

And being there on the day, Pegg got to get a first-hand view of Cruise’s heroics. “When he actually did the take off, I wasn’t shooting my scene, so I actually got on the plane just to have a ride in an A400. They said, ‘Hey, you want to come and sit on the plane?’ So I did one circuit in the cockpit with the pilots, which was kind of fun, for my own enjoyment, and then I sat back in the cargo bay … meanwhile Mr. Cruise was on the side of the plane! That was a truly memorable day, I can tell you.”

“The thing about Tom is that he relishes this stuff. He enjoys it. It’s not like these things are easy to do, because they’re not, but he relishes the challenge and the effort it takes because I think he likes to be stretched. I worry in a way – like if we do Mission: Impossible 6, he’s going to have to go into because he can’t get any higher.”

Directed by Chris McQuarrie and co-starring Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Ferguson and Ving Rhames, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation will open in the UK on 30 July 2015 and the US the following day.